Wood Gear Clocks

Hi Steve,

Now I have it complete I wanted to give you some feedback on a build variant of the SP6 Silent Desk Clock, the story being after building one of Clayton Boyer’s  wooden design back in December  I was eager to tackle another project  ideally a small form factor and the SP6 ticked many of the boxes.

The only downside being I really wanted a wooden implementation, did see on your site that it was on your to do list and yet to come. Having learned a lot from building Clayton’s clock I figured why not have a stab it. I must say at the outset it’s a great design and fair play to you for doing all the hard work on the coding and sussing out the new CNC V4 shield variant which for sure achieves such a smooth and silent result.

Let me give you some detail on my build that might give you food for thought in getting a wooden variant to market.

I stuck to the  original sizing save for some tweaking of the frame base front and back to make it better suited to  fabrication in wood, the essential updates  are as follows.

(1). Gear’s fabricated with a  home build MPCNC machine on 6mm baltic birch ply, changed the tooth profiles all to involute  type with  some  mixed styling on the wheel cut-outs.

(2). The arbors are all on 1/8 (3mm) stainless rod ~450mm required and for the hour and minute

brass tube 5/32 (60mm) & 3/16 (35mm) respectively, did fit some 5/32 (10mm) in the rear central position but to be honest it will run just fine in the bare wood.

(3). The  only parts I printed was a modified motor holder and some small washers these  an interference fit on the 1/8 rod used as end rod end  stops and for  gear positioning  no reason to not them in wood  it was just faster to print them.

I cut the Gear 5 shaft too short so  could not fit the knob at the rear no big  issue the clock can be readily be adjusted by simply  moving Gear5_12 by hand I’ll fit it when I get hold of  more 1/8 rod.

Have not positioned CNC V4 under the clock yet,  the TMC2208 heat sink  is rather tall I need to cut 2-3mm off it, saying that I pick up on no heat dissipation at and suspect it would run fine without it.

If you ever wanted some DXF’s  of these updated gears can share them  with you.

Here are a few images ...

>Motor Holder & Gear

 >Gear Detail (Gears finished in Tung Oil)

>Rear View

>Front View

Lastly I did have one query on the Arduino nano software the image I used off the website was ‘Clock_Shield_rev2p08’ when I first tried the clock the motor was running the wrong direction and I went to change this by fitting the leftmost jimper position however it did not work as expected the motor will not run with it installed, the other three jumpers work ok and do change the speeds.

Am not too familiar with coding however my interpretation suggests that this jumper is ‘CoolEN’ which sets a debug mode, is this correct or is there some other code variant?

This was not a major problem reversing the motor header plug changes the direction.

Regards.

Michael